Peter May - The Runner

Li stood rock still, keeping his emotions on a tight rein. In many ways he hadn’t thought it through at all. His application for a position with Beijing Security had been a half-hearted attempt to face up to the realities of his situation. But, in truth, he had been burying his head in the sand and hoping that somehow it would all go away.

‘For heaven’s sake, Li, you are the youngest Section Chief in the history of the department. You are one of the most highly regarded police officers in China. What kind of woman is it who would ask a man to give all that up for the sake of a wedding ring?’

‘Margaret hasn’t asked me to give up anything,’ Li said, quick to her defence.

‘What do you mean? She must know what’ll happen if you marry her.’ Li said nothing, and the Commissioner’s eyes widened. ‘Are you telling me you haven’t told her? That she doesn’t know?’

Li blinked rapidly as he felt his eyes start to fill. ‘She has no idea.’ And for the first time he saw what looked like pity in the Commissioner’s eyes.

‘Then you’re an even bigger fool than I thought,’ he said with sad resignation. ‘It is just a shame that your uncle is not here to talk some sense into your bone head.’

‘If my uncle were here,’ Li said stiffly, ‘I am certain he would be appalled by his old department’s lack of flexibility. He always said to me, if you cannot bend with the wind, then you will break.’

The Commissioner shook his head. ‘Then it’s a pity you didn’t listen to him.’ He snapped his hat firmly back on his head and nodded curtly. ‘You can expect notice to clear your desk in a matter of days.’ And he turned and walked briskly away towards the stairwell.

Li stood, a solitary figure, by the Martyrs’ Wall and felt their eyes upon him. The dead were his only company, and he was not sure he had ever felt quite so alone.

Heads lifted in only semi-disguised curiosity as Li strode into the detectives’ office. Tao was standing by Wu’s desk reading through a sheaf of forensic reports, peering over the top of his thick-rimmed glasses. He glanced up as Li came in, and his hand fell away, lowering the papers he was holding beyond the range of his lenses. Li looked at him very directly. ‘A word, please, Deputy Section Chief.’ And he walked into Tao’s office leaving his deputy to follow him in with every eye in the office on his back. Li closed the door behind them and turned to face Tao, his voice low and controlled. ‘I’ve been fighting an urge to kick the living shit out of you all the way across town,’ he said.

‘That wouldn’t be very smart.’ Tao removed his glasses as if he thought Li might strike him yet. ‘I would bring charges.’

Li said dangerously, ‘You wouldn’t be in a condition to do anything, Tao. They’d be feeding you with a spoon for the rest of your days.’ Tao held his peace, and Li said, ‘The only thing that stopped me was something my uncle taught me years ago. If you are offended by a quality in your superiors, do not behave in such a manner to those below you. If you dislike a quality in those below you, do not reflect that quality to those who work over you. If something bothers you from the man at your heels, do not push at the one in front of you .’

‘Sound advice,’ Tao said. ‘Pity you didn’t take it.’

Li glared at him for a long time. ‘You went behind my back on the Jia Jing report.’

Tao shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I tried to speak to you about it the other day, but you were “too busy”.’ His lips curled as he spat out the words. ‘A lunch appointment, I think.’ He hesitated, as if waiting for Li to say something.

‘Go on.’

‘I had a call from Procurator General Meng yesterday morning asking me to verify the details contained in Wu’s report.’

‘Why did he call you and not me?’

‘I would have thought that since you had signed off the report and he was seeking verification, that was obvious.’

‘So you told him I’d had it doctored.’

‘No. I had Wu come into my office and tell me exactly what happened that night. I then passed that information on to the Procurator General as requested. I play things by the book, Section Chief Li. I always have. And the way things are these days, I would have thought even you might have seen the merit in doing the same.’ His supercilious smile betrayed just how safe he thought he was, with Li’s expulsion from the force only a matter of days away. It was clearly an open secret now.

Li gazed on him with undisguised loathing. He knew he had been wrong to interfere with Wu’s report. He had ignored one of old Yifu’s basic precepts. If there is something that you don’t want anyone to know about, don’t do it . There was no such thing as a secret. A word whispered in the ear can be heard for miles , he used to say. And Li had also, as Tao took such glee in pointing out, ignored Yifu’s advice on treating others as you would wish them to treat you. And in the process had made an enemy of his deputy. It did not matter that he did not like the man. He had treated him badly, and that had come back to haunt him, like bad karma. What made it even worse, the salt in the wound, was the knowledge that Tao would probably succeed him as Section Chief. It was almost more than he could bear. ‘Even if you feel that I am not owed your respect, Deputy Section Chief, my office most certainly is. You should have spoken to me before you spoke to the Procurator General.’ Tao started to protest that he had tried, but Li held up a hand to stop him. This was hard enough to say without having to talk over him. ‘And in the future, I will try to make a point of listening.’

Tao seemed taken aback, realising perhaps that his boss had come just about as close to an apology as he was ever likely to get. It fluttered between them like a white flag of truce, as uneasy as it was unexpected. He made a curt nod of acknowledgement, and Li turned and left his office, ignoring the curious eyes that followed him through the detectives’ room to the door. As he walked down the corridor to his own office, he fought the temptation to feel sorry for himself. Next week they would take away the job he loved. But he was determined to crack this bizarre and puzzling case of the dead athletes before they did, to at least go out with his head held high. And to do that, he would need friends around him, not enemies.

Margaret’s taxi dropped her on the upper ramp at Beijing Capital Airport, a bitter wind blowing dark cloud down from the north-west, the air filled with the sound of taut cables whipping against tall flagpoles. She entered the departure lounge and took an escalator down to the arrivals hall below. The large electronic board above the gate told her that her mother’s flight was on time and she groaned inwardly. Any delay would have given her a brief reprieve. A few more moments of freedom before falling finally into the family trap that would hold her at least until after the wedding.

A sleazy-looking young man wearing a leather jacket with a fur collar sidled up. ‘You want dollah?’

‘No.’ Margaret started walking away.

He followed her. ‘You want RMB? I shanja marni.’

‘No.’

‘You want taxi? I get you good price.’

‘I want peace. Go away.’

‘Real good price. Only three hundred yuan.’

‘Fuck off,’ she breathed into his face, and he recoiled in surprise from this fair-haired foreign devil with the mad blue eyes.

‘Okay, okay,’ he said and scuttled off in search of someone more gullible.

Margaret sighed and tried to calm herself. But the imminent arrival of her mother was making her tense beyond her control. She had put off even thinking about it until the very last minute. Almost until she had gone in search of a taxi to take her to the airport. Although they had spoken on the telephone, they had not met face to face since Margaret’s trip to Chicago for her father’s funeral. And then, they had only fought. She had been her daddy’s girl. He had given her hours of his time when she was a child, playing endless games, reading to her, taking her to the movies or out on the lake in the summer. By contrast, her earliest recollections of her mother were of a cold, distant woman who spent hardly any time with her. After Margaret’s brother drowned in a summer accident, she had become even more withdrawn. And as Margaret grew older, her mother only ever seemed to pick fault with her. Margaret, apparently, was incapable of doing anything right.